ABSTRACT
Photography has accumulated a series of complex histories alongside an equally complicated set of theoretical traditions, all of which illuminate but also sometimes confound how we understand the technological and ontological dimensions of the photographic, let alone the role of photography as a meaning-making practice. In describing photography as a "truly unprecedented type of consciousness" and "an anthropological revolution in man's history," Barthes famously alerts us to its distinct innovation alongside its unsettling ontology, one that uncovers not the being-there of the thing but its "analogical perfection." Perhaps part of the enduring difficulty of photography lies in being torn, like Barthes, between expressive and critical responses to photographic images. The essays thus continually highlight the unsettling nature of photographic images in a range of contexts or genres and how the re-uses and interpretations of photographic images unsettle the self-evident reality of their visual field or historical location.
